At the near end of Chestnut Street a house rises from the earth like a muddied dandelion. A lock, brass and pointed, its sole guardian, surveils the village street dogs and foragers returning from the forest. Behind it, a stone alley unfurls under lilac bushes into a garden as large as the house. On summer days, beneath sunshine and apple trees, Baba prunes her roses--freeing them from tendrils of stinging nettle. It is here as a child where I plucked snails off the undersides of broad leaves and spied for hedgehogs prickled with plum nectar. And it is here, much later as an adult, where I first heard ZABA.
Summer nights in Poland are gooey-sticky, and listening to ZABA felt like stepping into a fever dream. During a fit of insomnia as I laid awake plucking amber droplets of sap off the pine walls, I decided to give it a go. With titles as "Intruxx" and "Wyrd", ZABA provided few clues. Rolling the resin between my fingers, I elected to listen to "Gooey" first. I didn't know what to expect. I remember clearly that it was unlike anything I had heard before. Smooth, mysterious, and slightly out of key, the melody ascends on an ethereal vibraphone as a hushed voice beckons "Alright come close / Let me show you everything I know." Even through the plangent haze of my own exhaustion, it occurred to me that I stumbled upon a secret and began listening to other songs at random. "Hazey" was next. With its stripped-back and dry percussion, it struck me as a foil to "Gooey." I don't remember what I listened to after that. It wasn't "Walla Walla"--its twisted beat and layered vocals too frightening to listen to alone in the dark. I must have settled on "Cocoa Hooves" as the only slow song on the album. ZABA instantly reminded me of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon as you could drop a needle at any point on the record and experience the entire balance of the album. I closed my eyes and envisioned the ceiling filling with stars. They came out not all at once but one after another until eventually I ascended into a dream of my own. ZABA alerts you to its peculiarity as soon as you see it. On its cover, lovers and beasts laze about under amaranthine skies seemingly indifferent to their impending demise. Glass Animals invites us to place ourselves in this daydream set to the sounds of ambient field noises, cosmic drones, and tropical bird song. Bodies blocked with color are woven and disappear into their surroundings, obscuring where one ends and another begins. In secluded suburbs beneath the trees are secret worlds not easily seen. The arrival of ZABA unleashed a torrent of memories that I was unable to predict and powerless to resist. That first summer, I immersed myself in the album's A-side, attempting to make sense of its cryptic lyrics. The story begins with a distant memory on "Flip": "Here's to the one with the smoking stare / Running through my head with a bolo knife," before Dave Bayley begins to chant, "I wanna go back / I wanna go back / I wanna go back with a club and attack." From its opening chords, ZABA compels us to visit those moments of innocence we might otherwise forget. ● Nabokov once said that, "The more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes." And Poland in the '90s was strange. Each year, my mother took me and my brother to our homeland and each year it became more mysterious. As a child who could understand but not speak, Eastern Europe may as well have been another planet. Words flew by quickly but time passed slowly. When my grandparents spoke, I imagined that they were fencing with their tongues. Baba uttered each syllable with such sussurus as if she cast an incantation, a spell, a prayer. For years I knew Poland only as the land of eternal summer where my brother and I would play in my grandmother's garden. On days when the heat became unbearable, Baba took us to the forest to soak up the cool stored in its canopy. Sensing our fear, she encouraged us to seek solace in its divine details. Before long, I came to know Poland by the smell of mud-ripened mulberries under my toes, the colors of the fields inlaid with lace, the imperceptible croak of a sand frog concealed by the underbrush. Baba taught me that no detail is too insignificant, for detail is what makes the world our own. Perhaps I had sensed but not yet realized that ZABA is a similar project. The inspiration for ZABA stems from William Steig's eponymous children's book The Zabajaba Jungle, which chronicles a young boy's journey deep into the mysterious dark. Steig's text is unusual by literary standards because it leaves the conclusion open-ended, allowing readers to decide what happens for themselves. ZABA reimagines this coming-of-age story as an environmental rhapsody that ripens, gleans, and decays with the production. The result is a raw, organic, and poetic record that may be understood as a concept album or as an autobiographical meditation on youth. Each summer I have returned to Poland and listened to ZABA differently. I began listening intentionally only when Baba became sick. Her dementia revealed itself slowly and with strange clues. She could no longer smell, she announced one day, a spoon of peanut butter pressed to her nose. Her sense of taste was next. We only became concerned when she became transfixed with the clock. Of course she knew what a clock was, she said, only she didn't know what time meant anymore. Dementia has the uncanny effect of reducing everything to the sensorial--like how a favorite smell or a bird call can take you back to a specific place. For 45 minutes, ZABA transports me to those childhood summers spent in my grandmother's garden. Glass Animals’ reimagining of Steig's text is a feat of music production, but it's the interplay between their meditation on aging and the profoundly unsettling experience of Baba's dementia that most resonate now. The album's world-building ties together my transition from child to adult in Poland as well as Baba's regression from adult to child. ZABA is an irrepressible march that captures the sensation of aging as a descent from innocence to experience. ● Spring comes suddenly to Poland. Overnight, the ice cracks up. It drips, it swells, it weeps until the wasted white earth is engulfed in an emerald sea. By May, the sun sets late over the fields causing the eyes of poppies to expand and burst in dazzling heat. I've been in love only once, long ago. But the sensation of it was so spectacular in its suddenness that it might only be compared to the miracle of spring. "Pools" crept up on me. Opening with bird calls that the band recorded in Australia, "Pools" captures the feeling of first love as wanting and blossoming. Bayley sings, "Put the flowers in your hair / Wrap your tendrils round my chest / I smile because I want to / I am your boy." He has publicly rejected the notion of writing popular love songs, quipping that "Enough songs have been written about people loving girls." "Pools" strikes me as a worthy exception. What begins as a gentle walk builds into a colossal symphony of synths and chirps. "Pools" is so rich in its complexity that one misplaced tweet threatens to send it all crashing down. Inexplicably, my favorite moment on the album is when Bayley lets out a terrible cry during the song's climax. As suddenly as it comes, his shout-cry fractures and fans out before evaporating into the ether. To me, the moment captures the sensation of giving yourself completely to another as exalted as it is terrifying. This moment of Bayley's awakening is vital. Only when we relinquish control may the transcendent beauty of the spirit triumph over the physical beauty of the body. It's as if the center can no longer hold and Bayley bursts forth like a flock of birds, finally ready to fly free. ● Nighttime creeps in as the nightingale sings. Baba's house didn't fall apart overnight, but slowly. I had recognized but perhaps not fully understood the gravity of Baba's dementia until she began watering the plants and couldn't stop. The world flipped that afternoon. She disappeared as soon as we arrived at the house, emerging from the kitchen moments later with a jug of water. She orbited the living room, ricocheting from fern to fiddle-leaf. I watched as the black milk so pure in its cleanness overflowed their banks and seeped into the parquet floors. Down the hall, mushrooms danced up the ceiling, sending an avalanche of stucco onto the carpet below. Death leaves its signature as a minor chord on "Cocoa Hooves." Call it the paralysis of grief, but for years "Cocoa Hooves" was the only song on ZABA I have avoided--perhaps precisely because it was too resonant. There's a saying in Polish that when someone you love dies the clock stops. I have long interpreted this literally, as death transforms all into an irreducible singularity where even time ceases to be relevant. Only know do I understand how it feels. ZABA culminates with Bayley on the verge of complete psychic self-annihilation. The album's concluding song, "JDNT," imagines a new ending to this paradise. On it, Bayley delivers some of his most impactful lyrics: "Weak and worried I / Shut my wild eyes / And crumble to a pile / Of dust and fertilise." Unlike ZABA's namesake, which leaves the story open-ended, Bayley invites us to start again at the beginning. Closeness to death brings us back to life. ● Summer came once more and we began to fix the house. It was August when we moved Baba into the village's sole nursing home, a very square and very yellow building just down the road lined with linden trees. We tell her that it's a sanatorium--that she will return home, to her garden, when she gets better. But it's no use. Each day she asks where she is, each day a new mystery. I saw her at summer's end. When I left the house that afternoon, I had taken the longer path by the forest's edge. On my way, I saw the first chestnut shell of the season that resembled a turtle in the sand. I remember it clearly because I didn't know what I would say and so I began searching for things that would distract me from the lump of ice forming in my heart. Baba was a brilliant woman. She will persist like this, continuing to forget until the day she forgets how to swallow. Her fate seems crueler when you consider how time has left her not even the faintest morsel of a memory. My mother advised me to bring our old photo album. She learned after visiting Baba daily that occasionally she would recognize details in the photographs, most often from her own childhood. Without warning, a photograph slips from my notice as if to escape. It's of little-me, my feet bare and muddy, wearing an oversized shirt with wet uncombed hair pressed to my face. Baba stands in the background, smiling with a hose. I would sit back and watch, I decide. A nurse around my age greets me and points me in the direction of the picnic pavilion. I occupy a bench under a baleful row of oaks and wait for my mother and Baba to appear. Above the pavilion flies a topaz dream-catcher that the residents made from a reclaimed bicycle tire. I wonder if this is where Baba's memories go and whether they will get a second life as dreams. Watching it undulate in the breeze, I feel myself floating to the ceiling experiencing a brief death of my own. A momentary respite. Through the oak trees and the high-wire fence, I watch a young family returning from the forest with baskets of mushrooms in tow. I catch a glimpse of a little boy who reminds me of my brother. He is smaller than Adam and wearing thick corrective goggles, not really much like him at all. He trails behind carrying a stick much too heavy for him. The stick he drags, his legs, too, but his head is held high--a small sign of victory after a long day of fighting imaginary battles. He is going home. Then, Baba appears before me. She is smaller than I remember, almost childlike. Her white wool cardigan gives her an air of innocence that, too, is unfamiliar. Just her eyes, now cast in a low green glow, are recognizable. Although I knew Baba for two decades, I continue to learn new details that suggest I will never know her fully. My mother insists she was much like me. We could have been sisters. Baba no longer recognizes me. She guesses that I am her daughter, although she isn't certain which one. Jestem Ola--I say. Your granddaughter. But it's no use. She gingerly produces a decades-old photograph of me and my brother playing in the fields. Those, she insists, are her grandchildren. Memories like these we carry with us for a lifetime. Beyond the photograph and behind the trees is the same hill that my brother and I used to race up as children. My legs then were barely long enough to carry me to the top. Now, on this hot day, I still feel small standing on the hill that ascends to the forest. I wonder what is obscured by the photograph, and whether it is a truth I knew at the age of five but do not know now. And then, there are moments when Baba is present and asks good questions as a grandmother does. Am I still in school? When will I finish? What will I do? When she asks if I found a good man who can give me children, I don't know how to respond. Before it can occur to me to lie, she senses my hesitation. She hopes that one day I might, for being with her grandchildren was her life's greatest joy. ● ZABA is worth a listen. Its obvious and enduring appeal lies in its mystery. After nearly a decade, ZABA has the uncanny ability of revealing new sounds, new worlds, with every listen. It is one of the rare albums that becomes more imaginative with every encounter. And yet, ZABA preserves those gardens of memory where we might safely wander. Close your eyes. When you listen to ZABA, where does it take you? Does it transport you to a past life, or another world entirely? When Bayley asks, "Oh don't it leave that filthy taste / When you squeeze that life untamed?" we are to understand this as a positive message. To live unencumbered in the world is a rare and precious thing. ZABA invites us to do just that by listening beyond that which is serviceable to us. Why don't you see with your ears, breathe with your belly, or listen with your skin? Or as Bayley puts it, "Why don't you set your wings on fire?" I've struggled to articulate why ZABA matters, if only to me, but the reason is quite simple. ZABA reminds me of my grandmother and of those summer days when she still knew me. It continues to inspire hope in me that somewhere there might exist that same garden, that same incorruptible beauty. One day, in the springtime, in the sunshine, we will meet again. Then I will tell her about all the details she missed--every crenelated little snail and each chartreuse hue. There is an important lesson to be gleaned from ZABA. The same wisdom of the forest that gives rise to children, artists, and other creatures is accessible to all those who submit. Glass Animals encourages us to select details that we will carry forth to the future. To relish these details is an act of love because it is to remember that which would otherwise be forgotten. Now, as I listen to "Pools," I'm surprised to feel something I haven't in a decade. It isn't the sound of ice cracking up, but it's numinous--like the sun bursting through a cloudy Tuesday. As I reencounter this melody, it's as if I'm meeting an old friend who has grown. The same notes, the same lyrics now resonate with a new layer of meaning. I don't know what it means. But it is enough to know that sense still exists--that it hasn't yet crept from my bones and into the earth. As time has passed, it's clear that the radicle of this feeling has extended downward and within me, a part still yearns for the light. I've been listening to "Cocoa Hooves" more lately. Its imagery of self-immolation reminds us to celebrate life in all its seasons and cycles. The moon will continue to sail across the stars, the birds will erupt in flight and take to the forest--life will begin anew. In an age increasingly dominated by manufactured social pressures, ZABA compels us to slow down, unplug, and listen. Childhood song is the most precious of them all. To me, ZABA is exquisite. I know nothing else like it other than the majesty of my grandmother's garden--gooey, sentimental, sublime.
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